Romano Mussolini

Romano Mussolini, who has died aged 78, was a talented jazz musician and the last surviving child of Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Though never actively involved in politics, he made an important contribution to a process that is subtly altering Italians' view of their recent past and transforming his father's image from that of an irascible despot into a benevolent, if occasionally misguided, patriarch.

Ironically, had the fascist regime survived, Romano would have had the greatest difficulty pursuing his chosen career. Jazz, with its roots in black culture, was censured - and censored - by his father's government. American musicians were given Italian names so they could be shoehorned into the country's nationalist outlook. Louis Armstrong, for instance, first became known to Italians as Luigi Fortebraccio.

Romano, the youngest of the five children of Il Duce (the Leader), was born in Carpena. He had his first experience of jazz listening to vinyl records belonging to his older brother, Vittorio. There was already a musical streak in the family - Benito Mussolini played the violin - and Romano taught himself the piano. He later recalled accompanying his father as they played classical pieces together.

After the second world war, Romano turned to music for a living. He joined a quartet that recorded a popular version of How High the Moon. But for many years his surname remained a handicap and for a time in the 1950s he used an assumed name, Romano Full. The fascist regime's mistrust of jazz had held back the development of the genre in Italy so that, for longer than in much of the rest of Europe, jazz music in Italy meant traditional jazz. Romano, whose idol was the great Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson, helped win a following for a more contemporary approach. In 1956, he played at the first Italian jazz festival at San Remo.

His career hit a high point in 1963 when his band, the Romano Mussolini All Stars, recorded an album, Jazz allo Studio 7, that won that year's Italian critics award. Its success helped launch him on a series of international tours in which he played with some of the greatest names in 20th-century music, among them Chet Baker, Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie.

If the Mussolini surname had been a drawback for much of Romano's life, it ceased to be so in the early 1990s, when Italy's old political order collapsed. From the ruins emerged a new right, led by the country's richest man, Silvio Berlusconi, and comprising an unlikely alliance between neo-liberals and neo-fascists. The entry into government in 1994 of Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance, a superficially reshaped version of the Italian Social Movement that had been set up to perpetuate Benito Mussolini's ideas, reignited interest both in fascism and the late dicator's family. It also set in train a process of historical revisionism enthusiastically promoted by Berlusconi, who three years ago said the former dictator "never killed anyone".

Romano Mussolini condemned the laws enacted by his father that led to the deportation to Nazi death camps of some 7,000 Italian Jews. But he stopped a very long way short of disowning his political and ideological legacy, and in a recent interview said that he thought 90% of what his father had done was "positive". In 2004 he published a memoir entitled Il Duce, My Father, which depicted the fascist leader as a caring, family man.

Romano's first marriage was to the sister of the actor Sophia Loren. One of their two children is the politician Alessandra Mussolini, a fierce defender of her grandfather's memory, who broke with the National Alliance in protest at Fini's insistence on a break with the fascist past. It was on the website of Alessandra Mussolini's breakaway party that the news of her father's death was announced. He was cremated last weekend after a service at a Rome church during which friends from the world of jazz played New Orleans funeral anthems and some members of the congregation gave straight-armed salutes.

He leaves his second wife, Carla Puccini, their daughter Rachele, his first wife, Anna Maria Scicolone, and their daughters Alessandra and Elisabetta.

· Romano Mussolini, jazz musician, born September 26 1927; died February 3 2006